U-T Multimedia: For a video interview with Mike Smathers, and a look at the community where he fought back the fire, go to uniontrib.com/ more/ smathers

“He saved all our homes. He was just one man. He was our hero,” Glenda Little said.

Of course, Smathers doesn't see it that way.

The 36-year-old husband and father lives northeast of Ramona at Oak Tree Ranch, a manufactured-home community off Black Canyon Road. The development was the first densely populated neighborhood to be hit by the Witch Creek fire. Smathers was there when flames crested a hill to the east around midnight on Day 1.

That Sunday had started normally for Smathers, a 13-year firefighter for the U.S. Forest Service who recently became a law enforcement officer for the agency.

He got up at 6 a.m., took his 5-year-old son, Trevor, to his parents' house in Escondido and went to work. His wife, Penny, a dispatcher for the Forest Service, was also at work. Their dog, TJ, a shepherd mix, was at home.

SCOTT LINNETT / Union-Tribune

Wally Hardison thanked neighbor Mike Smathers (right) for saving his home from flames.

Smathers and his partner were working near Temecula when they were told to rush to the Witch Creek area and help deal with what was then a small fire that had started shortly after noon.

The next 12 hours are something of a blur, Smathers said. The fire was out of control, and he spent the afternoon and evening racing from house to house in the Rancho Santa Teresa and Lake Sutherland areas urging residents to flee.

Penny kept him informed about what was happening close to home. Oak Tree Ranch was evacuated about 6 p.m. Smathers went home shortly before midnight to pack up his truck and get their dog.

But he didn't leave. For 45 minutes, Smathers watched the glowing eastern skyline until flames appeared.

“It came right down the hill, moving really, really, really quick,” he said. “It was just cranking. It started hitting some of the homes on the east side.”

Smathers did what he says he would never suggest to anyone. “I decided to stay. Someone had to be here when the fire front came, to at least put some embers out.”

He sped to the Forest Service office about a half-mile away on Black Canyon Road and loaded his truck with fire hoses. Back at Oak Tree Ranch, he hooked up the hoses to the community's fire hydrants and laid hose lines up and down streets in the northwestern part of the 114-home neighborhood.

Because he no longer works as a firefighter, Smathers didn't have any protective fire gear. No Nomex clothing, no goggles, not even an air mask. Just his Forest Service uniform and a bullet-resistant vest.

The fire soon reached the large oaks that give the neighborhood its name. Flames were arching 100 feet overhead. All 50 houses on the east side of the community's central road were ablaze.

“The houses looked like skeletons completely on fire. Every couple minutes another house would go up.”

Smathers knew that if he couldn't stop the flames at the road, “they would take everything.”

Embers, some as big as six inches, were falling. The stream of water coming from the fire hoses was weak, powered only by gravity from a large tank on high ground because the electricity had failed and a pump was dead.

But it was enough for Smathers as he ran from house to house spraying water on embers and shoving things such as flaming patio furniture and bark away from the homes. He concentrated on about 20 houses, those near his house but closer to the road.

“If I could keep the heat off the homes in front of my house, then they wouldn't catch the next house and the next house and the next house and the next house,” Smathers remembers thinking.

“For the longest time I did that, just kept it contained as best as I could with what pressure I had.”

When the smoke got too much to bear “and my eyes were watering and snot was pouring out my nose,” Smathers said he would retreat to his truck and turn on the air conditioner for a few minutes. TJ was waiting there.

“He just sat in the truck and looked at me as if thinking, 'Are you stupid?' ” Smathers said.

He saved the home of the girl who baby-sits Trevor, and Doris'home next door to his. And Nancy's and Wally's and Glenda's and many more.

A neighbor, Robert Fitzgerald, had stayed behind, too, but was busy defending his house.

“I helped him out a little bit, but that man should totally get the credit. When there wasn't anybody else around, he was there,” said Fitzgerald, 44.

A couple of times during the more than three-hour fight, four Forest Service firefighters came by to help. Led by firefighter Chris Brenzel, a friend of Smathers', they arrived in a pickup and a patrol vehicle equipped only with a 50-gallon water tank, and did what they could in other areas of the community. But they could stay only a short time before being called away.

Brenzel said the flames moved across the outskirts of Ramona like a river of fire and Smathers did the best job possible. “He saw what needed to be done and he did it,” Brenzel said.

By about 4 a.m., most of the fire had blown through the community. Two fire engines finally arrived. Smathers had already left for Escondido and sleep.

All the homes on the east side of Oak Tree Ranch were destroyed, but only three out of 47 were lost in the section of the community where Smathers made his stand. The fire skipped the 17 homes in a third area of the community.

Smathers doesn't recommend that others do as he did in the face of a wildfire.

“I would never condone anybody staying at their house. Not if they don't have some type of experience,” he said. “It's probably crazy that I even stayed. But I understand the aspect of safety zones and escape routes. I know when to pull the plug and bail. The normal homeowner will not know that and stay and fight to the very end and they may end up with their death. . .

“Everybody keeps saying I'm a hero. I'm not a hero. I just did what I was trained to do as a firefighter,” Smathers said. “If I could have saved everybody's house I would have tried. I just didn't have any water pressure.”